Economists generally agree: China must overhaul its huge but wasteful economy if it wants to continue to grow in the years to come. That means limiting political interference in banking and the financial system, making bloated industries more sensitive to market forces and lowering barriers against foreign trade and investment.

Proponents took heart in late 2012 when President Xi Jinping took formal control of the Chinese Communist Party with pledges to crack down on corruption and cut red tape.

Today, as Mr. Xi nears the end of his first five-year term, much of the optimism among economists has faded. China remains heavily dependent on large investments and has maintained brisk but slowing economic growth only with a steep rise in government-steered lending. Still, his administration has made some small changes, and there have been hints that Mr. Xi may focus more on economic overhauls when he starts his second term.

Here is what Mr. Xi has done so far — and, more important, what he has not done.

Currency

Reforms: Experts give some credit for China’s moves on currency. Beijing persuaded the International Monetary Fund in 2015 to admit its currency, the renminbi, to an elite club of currencies in which central banks hold their reserves. To win approval, China made it much easier to move money in and out of the country, and shifted the daily pegging of the renminbi to the dollar to a slightly more market-based system.

Lingering problems: Those moves have been in doubt lately. Opening up money flows led so many Chinese families and companies to send their money out of the country that the renminbi weakened against the dollar and the Chinese government had to spend nearly $1 trillion to prop it up. In the past 12 months, Beijing has reimposed many restrictions on sending money out of the country.

Real Estate

Reforms: Faced early last year with a huge supply of unsold real estate and stalling construction, Beijing decided to make it much easier for banks to issue mortgages. This set off a buying frenzy in big cities that slightly pared the backlog of empty apartments.

Lingering problems: What looked like a bubble before looks like one even more so now. Beijing and Shanghai already have some of the world’s highest real estate prices in relation to local incomes. Developers are still heavily in debt.

Financial Markets

Reforms: China made limited moves to allow foreigners to trade more extensively in the bond market, hedge their currency risk and connect its stock markets in Shanghai and Shenzhen with Hong Kong, which has long served as China’s financial gateway to the rest of the world. Local governments have been discouraged from setting up companies that borrow heavily to pay for public works.

Lingering problems: Any moves to open up have been overshadowed by tighter government control after a 2015 stock market crash. A major stock market index passed on including Chinese stocks, citing the need for further improvements. New public-private partnerships have emerged to continue China’s borrowing spree. While Chinese officials had hoped that the private partners would force local governments to make wiser and more cautious investments, the initial “private” partners have tended to be state-owned enterprises, which typically share local governments’ interest in borrowing heavily to create jobs.

Banking

Reforms: China has moved to help banks plagued by a rising tide of bad loans. Banks have been allowed to swap a few of those unpaid loans for equity stakes in troubled borrowers. Asset management companies have been buying some bad loans from banks. Banks have been given growing discretion to set interest rates based on the creditworthiness of borrowers. The interest rates that banks pay on deposits have been deregulated, allowing a competition among banks that benefits depositors.

Lingering problems: Those moves are not enough. Banks still face a large overhang of loans to money-losing companies with little hope of repayment. Banks continue to roll over loans to troubled borrowers and extend huge loans to politically connected borrowers, including influential private companies as well as state-owned enterprises. If the economy does slow sharply, the mountain of bad loans will grow much more. At the same time, entrepreneurs continue to complain that the system denies them the access to cheap money that they need to grow.

Industrial Overcapacity

Lingering problems: It has a lot more work to do. China still has roughly the same steel-making capacity as the rest of the world combined. China still has too many coal mines given its long-term plans to shift to more solar, wind and nuclear energy. In many other industrial sectors, intense competition and slowing economic growth have curbed private investment.

State-Owned Enterprises

Reforms: Pay has been limited for top executives. A few enterprises have been merged, notably in rail equipment, to limit the extent to which they compete with one another for overseas sales.

Lingering problems: China’s state-run companies remain bloated and inefficient. Monopolies and oligopolies continue to dominate large sectors of the economy, like telecommunications and power transmission. State-owned enterprises in sectors like steel making and coal mining tend to focus mainly on preserving employment for their workers, no matter how much money they need to borrow from state-controlled banks to cover financial losses. And those pay limits? They may drive talented leaders to the private sector.

Demographics

Reforms: Faced with a shrinking labor force and a population that is rapidly graying, Mr. Xi ended China’s notorious one-child policy, with its fines and forced abortions, and his government has even begun mulling whether to offer incentives for families to have a second child.

Lingering problems: The labor force will continue to shrink for decades, presenting a serious drag on economic growth.

Urbanization

Reforms: The government has made it easier for migrant workers from rural areas to obtain residency and access to social benefits in medium-size and smaller cities. The government is preparing to move the municipal bureaucracy of Beijing at the end of this year to an outlying suburb as part of an experiment aimed at testing whether it can build satellite cities around major metropolitan centers.

Lingering problems: Rural migrants still have little hope of gaining residency in big cities like Beijing and Shanghai. Without residency, their access to medical insurance, education for their children and other benefits is limited.

Ailin Tang contributed research.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A10 of the New York edition with the headline: Tweaks That President Made, and Challenges That Remain. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe